I burned the ISO to a DVD+R but you can mount it to a drive letter on the host OS. (Virtual PC does not support ISO images over 2.2GB so the mount must be on the host OS.)

Create a new Virtual PC.  I used 256MB RAM and 16GB virtual hard drive.

Boot from the DVD or host os mounted image.

Click "Install Now".

Since the Windows Vista Beta 1 installer does not support RAW drives (ie. virtual hard drives) you must do the following:
See the Readme file for more details.  (However I was able to install it on VMWare without a problem.)

Press Shift-F10 to get a command prompt.  (I wasn't able to get Shift-F10 to work until after I selected "Install now".)

Type DISKPART at the command prompt to start the diskpart tool.

Type the following commands in diskpart:

select disk 0
create partition primary
select volume 1
format fs=ntfs label="windows vista"

Type EXIT to exit diskpart.

Reset the virtual pc via the Virtual PC Console window.

When you reboot an install, the partition will be ready to be selected.


Total install took 3 hours.  Compared to 1 hour with VMWare (see link). (I did use a little less memory in VPC, could that be why?)

Keywords:  Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 VPC2004 VPC 2004 Longhorn Microsoft Vista Beta 1 OS